Dissertation in the field of Radio Engineering, Subash Khanal
The title of thesis is "Characterisation of Schottky diodes and dielectric materials for millimeter wave and THz applications".
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The Schottky diode is the key component in almost all non-cryogenic mixer and multiplier applications at millimeter wave and THz frequencies. Both the mixer and the local oscillator chain multipliers are typically built using Schottky diodes in these frequencies. The ability of such diodes to operate up to few THz at room tempera-tures, make them a cheaper and reliable alternative over other available technolo-gies for building millimeter wave and THz source and detectors. Hence, efficient characterisation and modelling techniques have a key role in the development of Schottky diode-based devices with a state-of-the-art performance. In this work, an effort has been made to characterise electrical, thermal, noise and RF properties of the Schottky diodes under normal operating conditions. Thermal, as well as electri-cal, properties can affect the overall reliability and performance if the instruments that are based on Schottky diodes. Specially, in case of a satellite instrument (re-ceivers and detectors), it is necessary to characterise all the components before launching it to the orbit.
Measurement of the dielectric properties of the material is an important tool to un-derstand the material behavior especially at high frequencies as it can provide the electrical or magnetic characteristics of the materials. This information is a critical parameter required to implement the material in many microwave and mm-wave applications. In this work, an effort has been made to extract the dielectric properties of the test materials (e.g. polymers) at millimeter wave frequencies. The developed extraction method is used to study the suitability of various polymer materials for printing millimeter wave components such as antennas.
Opponent: Dr. Alain Maestrini, Observatoire de Paris - LERMA, France
Supervisor: Professor Antti Räisänen, Aalto University School of Electrical Engineering, Department of Electronics and Nanoengineering.
Contact information:
Subash Khanal
subash.khanal@aalto.fi / subashkhanal@gmail.com
tel. +358 50 4205834